“That has been one of the keys to our growth — making sure we get the right people in from the beginning. If you get that right, you hire amazing people, they’ll be fine, and they’ll do amazing things”

Laszlo Bock, HR head, Google, at a Forbes Reinventing America conference in May

Till 2012, it wasn’t as if Naveen Tewari and the three other cofounders weren’t signing on the right people for the eight-year-young InMobi. It’s just that leading them was now becoming cumbersome, as the numbers got larger. The quartet were wrapped up in scaling what they claim is today the world’s largest and most powerful independent mobile advertising platform. In four months — between April and July, 2012 — the company’s employee base surged from 200 to 900. “We hired people to be on a massive growth trajectory,” recalls 37-year-old Tewari.

That growth, however, was proving elusive. What prevailed instead was chaos: people had overlapping responsibilities, the 700 new hires had little clue about InMobi — why they were brought in, and what they had to do. Result: unrest and inefficiency. In desperation, the company attempted to throw in some systems and structures, but that only further slowed down the lumbering tech startup.

“We realised we had made a big mistake around managing our people,” says Tewari. Corrective measures duly followed. For the past three years, InMobi has experimented with some very refreshing, counter-intuitive and even bizarre people policies to recruit, retain, engage and reward its employees.

Just like Google and Facebook, which In-Mobi wants to go head-tohead with. To do that, their talent management has to be as disruptive and far-reaching — and perhaps even more than the tech giants it is keen to emulate.

No Attendance Issues

Facebook is known not to track employee absences; John Sullivan, a professor of management and consultant at San Francisco State University, in a recent presentation titled ‘People Management Practices from Google, Facebook and Apple’, said the key lesson to learn from that is “if you focus on measure and reward performance, you won’t have attendance issues”.

InMobi isn’t there yet, but it has got its own variant of this Facebook policy: employees don’t need their supervisor’s approval for up to six days of leave. And there’s more — everybody gets a 100 per cent bonus (except the sales team, which could get more or less depending on performance), and performance appraisal systems have gone out the window.

There is no international travel expense policy; InMobi employees travel and spend as they please. If a new In-Mobi recruit quits within a month, he gets a quitting bonus — three months’ salary to go! Everybody at InMobi gets $800 annually as a ‘learning wallet’ which they can utilise to do anything — cooking classes, scuba-diving lessons, learning a new language or simply mastering new technologies. Also, everybody gets $200 every year to change their handsets.

When any InMobians — as the staff is called — want to quit and start a new venture, the company does everything they possibly can to support them. So instead of taking their access card away when they quit, InMobi is happy offering them free office space, allowing them to intermingle, brainstorm with their ex-colleagues and even eat the free food that a well equipped cafeteria serves round the clock.

“We have made some radical, disruptive changes around people management.

And the results are visible,” says Tewari. Earlier this month, InMobi made a big announcement in Silicon Valley with the rollout of a discovery feature called Miip on its platform. Miip, the company claims, is a “revolutionary discovery platform” that delivers “a consistent, personalised and content-rich experience that users will fall in love with” by presenting a curated collection of product feeds, apps and content with “stunning” visuals. “It is so advanced and cutting edge that it is ahead of its time. And all that work was done in India,” beams Tewari. InMobi is targeting a revenue of $1 billion by 2017 through Miip alone. It is also partnering with handset makers like Samsung to target 650 million smartphone users by embedding technology in the hardware so that ads are displayed while users are on their home screens.

“InMobi is truly an Indian company that has achieved global status and we all should be proud of it. They were ‘mobile only’ and ‘mobile first’ long before the terms were invented. They are one of the few companies in the world that have over a billion users. As they transition from a B2B [business-to-business] company to a consumer brand, and from advertising to commerce on the smartphone, they will continue to break new ground.”

People: Biggest Disruptive Force

The rules have changed. In the 21st century knowledge-led world, it is possible for an 11-year-old Facebook to overtake 220-year-old GE in market capitalisation.

The three most valuable companies in the world today are Apple, Microsoft and Google — technology-led giants that are relative newbies on the corporate landscape.

InMobiis clear that not all experiments with employee policies will work. The ones that do not work will be revisited

And if there is one weapon these giants are using effectively and efficiently to give them the competitive edge, it is their smart talent base.

“We are going to be a massive global internet company,” says Tewari. Harbouring such sky-high ambitions, Tewari knows where to look for cues. Pitted against giants like Facebook and Google, in an industry that is changing and growing at frenetic pace, the relatively small home-grown Indian company (media reports put its valuation at around $2.5-3 billion; still insignificant compared to Facebook’s $270 billion and Google’s $440 billion) is making some smart innovations around people policies to get ahead in the game. “We are in the business of innovation. People — and not products and profits — are our biggest asset,” says Abhay Singhal, cofounder of InMobi in charge of the people function.

There are many reasons why InMobi thinks that way. It is the only way it can flourish — or even survive. Operating across over 20 countries, pitted against giants, it knows well that it cannot win the game operationally. It has to be on the back of disruptive technology.

“We have to create disruption in technology and innovate not once or twice but constantly and consistently. Everyday. It demands disruptive people policies to achieve that,” says Tewari.

Born in 2007 and focused on mobile as the platform, InMobi operated in a niche space when it started. As smartphones and handheld devices get ubiquitous, the head start is proving useful.

According to a March 2015 eMarketer report, mobile ad spend is expected to grow from $19.2 billion (16 per cent of digital ad spend and 3.7 per cent of total media ad spend) in 2013 to $101.4 billion by 2016 (51 per cent of digital ad spend and 16.5 per cent of total media ad spend).

While Google is king in capturing both digital ad spend (31.45 per cent in 2014) and mobile ad spend (50.2 per cent in 2014), it is increasingly seeing tough competition in the mobile space. Facebook is playing catch-up rapidly, with mobile ads counting for almost $3 billion of its 2015 second quarter revenues of $4 billon, an all-time high.

That’s because Facebook users are spending more and more time on their smartphones.

Facebook’s mobile ad spend surged from 5.4 per cent in 2012 to 22.3 per cent in 2014, according to eMarketer.

To be sure, in the past two years, there has been significant consolidation in the adtech industry. In 2013, Twitter acquired MoPub, a startup that helps mobile publishers manage their ad inventory, for $350 million.

A year later, Facebook acquired LiveRail, a video ad startup, for $500 million, Yahoo acquired BrightRoll, another video ad firm, for $640 million and Google acquired Adometry, a marketing attribution company, for an undisclosed amount.

Mobile ad spend is expected to grow from $19.2 billion in 2013 to $101.4 billion by 2016

Unsurprisingly, in March this year, the grapevine crackled that Google would acquire InMobi at a valuation upwards of $2 billion. InMobi dismissed the rumour, and now seems keen to instead go head-on with the global giants. And its people are visibly the centrepiece of its innovation gambit.

“We have to create a people culture that is not just about incremental improvement but 10x [10 times earnings multiple ] and truly disruptive,” says Tewari. That of course isn’t easy. “The features and analytics on the In-Mobi ad platform are not as rich and robust as some of its competitors like Facebook and Google,” says Jayanth Kolla, partner, Convergence Catalyst, a tech research & advisory firm.

YaWiO Culture

InMobi says it is now fashioning its own people culture that’s curiously called YaWiO — imagination (haYa in Turkish), Oneness (aWirodhin in Sanskrit) and Action (Opus in Latin). “All people initiatives that we undertake at InMobi are a reflection of the YaWiO culture that we live,” says Anson Ben, director, learning & development, InMobi. Their cultural fest is called YaWiO-x; the first one was held early this year. The festival, like the name, is off-the-wall. For a reason. “Often it happens that you go really deep into a problem, and then take a break. Giving your mind that rest is a critical step in the idea generation process. Think Archimedes — his Eureka moment was in a bathtub. The incubator was created when an obstetrician visited a zoo.

Throughout history, we find stories like these,” explains Ben. The three-day YaWiO-x invited three not-for-profits institutions XPRIZE (focused on technology) and Magic Bus (focused on education), and aerospace startup Team Indus — to solve some of the big problems. XPRIZE, with impressive advisory board members like Elon Musk, James Cameron and Ratan Tata, threw a challenge to help solve women’s safety issues using technology. Magic Bus, which works with 4,00,000 children in slums and villages, threw a challenge to transmit educational content through extremely low bandwidth. And Team Indus, which is looking to land an unmanned rover on the moon, wanted help in setting up a communication system between the rover and the lander amidst harsh conditions on the moon.

“At InMobi, we have some of the best problem solvers

While taking a break, if they could help solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges, nothing like it,” says Ben. InMobians in 20 teams came together to find solutions to the problems.

“It is an interesting initiative. At a humanistic level, all of us want to get involved with something bigger than the self. We are on our way to solving the problem,” says Matthew Spacie, founder, Magic Bus.

The only way Indian companies can move to the next level, becoming global players with world-class products in this knowledge-led world, is by finding new ways to hire and manage smart talent. They need to do what Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook have managed to do around talent management which has helped them disrupt markets and bring about innovations. “They need to have their own version of YaWiO,to unleash their talent,” says Tewari.

There are two broad themes that are shaping InMobi’s people policies and its YaWiO culture. The first is the realisation that the world has changed. “About 25 years ago, GE set the benchmarks and the GE Way was the Bible for the corporate world in managing its people. That is no longer true,” says Tewari. The complex performance management system that these companies set up was geared to test how people behaved in predictable circumstances.

In traditional industries, where the job was repetitive, the thrust on process excellence worked.

The world today is far more unpredictable with many disruptive forces at work. How to remain nimble and flexible despite scaling up is a constant worry. Companies today need people with very different skills to survive and flourish. “They should be comfortable taking risks and think of disruptive ideas. We should work to remove the fear of failure,” says Tewari.

New Rules for 21st Century

With 100 per cent bonus policy for everyone (except sales team), the focus clearly is to push employees to give their best — not for a short-term financial incentive, but to create something truly disruptive. Similarly, conventional HR policies pertaining to travel and leave were dustbinned as often they are drafted keeping in mind that violations happen in 1 per cent of the cases.

For example, the company had a 10-page elaborate foreign travel policy document listing out expense limits in each country. One day they decided to get rid of the policy and asked people to travel and spend as if they were spending their own money. The fear of massive overspending was belied with only two out of a thousand-odd employees doing so. Even that 0.2 per cent quickly fell in line.

Similarly, the HR team analysed past leave approval data, which revealed that 90 per cent of leave requests were for under six days and almost 99 per cent of them got approved by the supervisor.

So the company decided that for leave requests for up to six days, no supervisor approval is required.

“We took away that power from the managers. Nobody misses it anymore,” says Kevin Freitas, director, human resources, InMobi.

InMobi aspires to give lot of learning and growth opportunities. One such is called a bridge assignment where employees can volunteer to take up short-term (three-month) projects alongside their day job. So a finance professional can take up a bridge assignment in marketing.

This helps the company break down the silo culture.

As InMobi experiments with these employee policies, it is clear that some policies will work and some will not.

“We will revisit them if we find they are not working,” says Singhal almost casually. As they go about attempting to become as big as the Facebooks of the world, the InMobi cofounders are also, either consciously or otherwise, going by the lessons of their iconic founders. After all, it was Mark Zuckerberg who said: “You’re better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all.”

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